Stefan Ekmans fantasyfunderingar

OK, folks, many of you may not be familiar with Fafnir, which is something as wonderful as a Nordic scholarly journal on the Fantastic. I know the editors well and they are great people (and yours truly is on the Advisory Board), whom you can trust with an article, conference report, or review. So go on, take a look at the CfP below.

CALL FOR PAPERS FAFNIR 3/2014

Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research invites authors to submit papers for the upcoming edition 3/2014.

Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research is a new, peer-reviewed academic journal which is published in electronic format four times a year. The purpose of Fafnir is to join up the Nordic field of science fiction and fantasy research and to provide a forum for discussion on current issues on the field. Fafnir is published by FINFAR Society (Suomen science fiction- ja fantasiatutkimuksen seura ry).

Now Fafnir invites authors to submit papers for its edition 3/2014. Fafnir publishes various texts ranging from peer-reviewed research articles to short overviews and book reviews in the field of science fiction and fantasy research.

The submissions must be original work, and written in English (or in Finnish or in Scandinavian languages). Manuscripts of research articles should be between 20,000 and 40,000 characters in length. The journal uses the most recent edition of the MLA Style Manual. The manuscripts of research articles will be peer-reviewed. Please note that as Fafnir is designed to be of interest to readers with varying backgrounds, essays and other texts should be as accessibly written as possible. Also, if English is not your first language, please have your article reviewed or edited by an English language editor.

The deadline for submissions is 15 June 2014.

In addition to research articles, Fafnir constantly welcomes text proposals such as essays, interviews, overviews and book reviews on any subject suited for the journal.

Please send your electronic submission (saved as RTF-file) to the following address: submissions(at)finfar.org. For further information, please contact the editors: jyrki.korpua(at)oulu.fi, hanna.roine(at)uta.fi and paivi.vaatanen(at)helsinki.fi.

This edition is scheduled for September 2014. The deadline for the submissions for the next edition is scheduled at 31 August (4/2014).

I’m incredibly honoured to find that my book, Here Be Dragons, made the finalists for the Locus Awards in the category Best Non-Fiction. When I begun writing my dissertation, I never suspected that it would end up there. Truth be told, I never would have suspected it once I was done, either.

On the Locus Index to SF Awards, you can find this to read about the award:

The Locus Awards are presented to winners of Locus Magazine‘s annual readers’ poll, which was established in the early ’70s specifically to provide recommendations and suggestions to Hugo Awards voters. Over the decades the Locus Awards have often drawn more voters than the Hugos and Nebulas combined. In recent years Locus Awards are presented at an annual banquet, and unlike any other award, explicitly honor publishers of winning works with certificates.

At the same time, I found out that my book is also on Locus’s Recommended-Reading List for 2013, which is almost as humbling. At the same time, I realised that I must have been working far too much this past year or so, to have missed all this. (The reason I’m so late with this post, however, is a flu-turned-sinusitis that has pretty much kept me under its thumb for weeks now.)

This autumn has been highly demanding in terms of work, hence the absence of blog posts. These past two days offered a welcome reprieve, in a way. I have attended a great course in digital humanities with Susan Schreibman of Trinity College Dublin and Jenny Bergenmar of Gothenburg University. Although two days are too short a time to do more than offer an introduction to the discipline (or is it a sub-discipline?), that introduction was very inspirational.

As some of you may know, I’m a great fan of close-readings. The closer, the better, in fact. But I also see the value of quantitative research. Nor am I a stranger to discussing the traits of an entire genre – the fantasy genre, to be practise. Over the past two days, I have come to realise how what could conceivably be termed ‘distance reading’ can bridge these three approaches. Using text analysis tools to look for patterns and clusters, it is possible to explore texts – in particular large texts or many texts – and find new ways into them. Even in cases when the text is fairly short, some patterns can surprise.

I explored Ted Chiang‘s wonderful short story ‘Exhalation’ with some of the tools. In my opinion, this story captures the very essence of science fiction, as it illustrates how the scientific process and scientific inquiry leads to a greater understanding of the world. It features a scientist for its protagonist and entropy as its central scientific concept. When I used Wordle to see which words figured prominently in the story, I ended up with this (click to watch at the Wordle website):

In this ‘word cloud’, the only relevant variable is the relative size of the words. Colour and position have only aesthetic value. Even so, a few words stand out in this cloud. It is obvious that this is a story about air, pressure, the universe, and thoughts, for instance. Given the title of the story and what I just told you about it, this is not surprising. What possibly surprised me was how clear the connection was between the story and its most prominent words. And I was intruiged by what I found when I used another tool, Voyant Tools , to dig a little deeper. The four graphs below show where in the text the prominent words appear (I have left out ‘one’, which should probably have been excluded as a ‘stop-word’, words that are very common but tell us litte about the content of a text):

What strikes me in all these graphs are how late in the story the bulk of the prominent words show up. ‘Pressure’ and ‘universe’ enter the text some 60% of the way into the story (the X-axis are tenths of the total word count, each tenth corresponding to about 650 words). ‘Air’ is more wideley dispersed, but there is a clear hump around 60-70%. ‘Thought/s’ is even more spread out, but still have a clear accumulation towards the end. To the extent that these words capture a central theme in Chiang’s story – and I believe they do – they also show how that theme only really gets going well into the second half of the story.

So what? Well, I don’t really know, yet. But now I can return to the text and try to find out. What does it mean to the plot that the most prominent words only really show up in the latter half? I can guess, but I had never thought about it. (And I have linked to the story, so feel free to find out for yourselves.)

These digital tools seem to offer new ways into texts that I thought I new, and my next step will probably be to apply some of them on my urban fantasy project. But more about that at a later date.

This is not really about fantasy or sf but about the nature of scholarship and the life as a scholar, so feel free to stop reading if you like.

My book Here Be Dragons has been out for about six months now, and reviews have started to appear. Some have been good (Thank you!), some have been annoying (It is a book of literary scholarship!), some have been indifferent, and, occasionally, some have raised interesting points (The settings of H. P. Lovecraft deserve a study of their own!). In a way, it is very much like a drawn out work-in-progress seminar, except no one tears your work apart at quite such fundamental level. Even a bad, annoying review cannot compare to the experience of having several really smart people inform you of every problem your text has, page by page. That pretty much inoculates you against disappointing reviews down the road.

But I thought I’d share one review with you, not because it is glowingly positive – it isn’t, not really – but because it drew my attention to something that I needed to have pointed out to me. Something I once was completely aware of but had forgotten. Jonathan Crowe, in a review of my map chapter, returned to the fact that what I have written is not the final word on fantasy maps but the first. And although I believe that the first words on this subject have been said (well, written) long before by other scholars, I agree: there is a long way yet to go, a lot more to do. And reading Crowe’s saying this, I suddenly remembered how much I wanted to go on looking at fantasy maps when I wrote the final sentences of my chapter. I have taken a slight look at fantasy city maps in a conference paper since then, but that’s about it.

And thanks to Crowe, I have come to realise how I can combine more map work with my current project about urban fantasy. In a way, the map and the city seem incompatible in fantasy, and yet, there are some maps that deal with urban environments. Time, thus, to drag maps into my thoughts about cities. Thank you, Jonathan!

Three Science Fiction Novellas by J.-H. Rosny aîné, translated from the French by Danièle Chatelain & George Slusser (Wesleyan University Press).

The Whispering Muse by Sjón, translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb (Telegram).

Note: The version of Roadside Picnic in question is a brand new translation of this well-loved work, and therefore eligible for the award despite the existence of a previous English language version.

Short Form

“Augusta Prime” by Karin Tidbeck translated from the Swedish by the author (Jagannath: Stories, Cheeky Frawg).

“Autogenic Dreaming: Interview with the Columns of Cloud” by Tobi Hirokata, translated from the Japanese by Jim Hubbert (The Future Is Japanese, Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington (eds.), Haikasoru).

“Every Time We Say Goodbye” by Zoran Vlahović, translated from the Croatian by Tatjana Jambrišak, Goran Konvićni, and the author (Kontakt: An Anthology of Croatian SF, Darko Macan and Tatjana Jambrišak (eds.), SFera).

“The Flower of Shazui” by Chen Qiufan, translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu (Interzone #243).

“A Single Year” by Csilla Kleinheincz, translated from the Hungarian by the author (The Apex Book of World SF #2, Lavie Tidhar (ed.), Apex Book Company).

The nominees were announced at Finncon 2013 in Helsinki, over the weekend of July 6-7 during a discussion about international science fiction. ARESFFT Board member Cheryl Morgan and jury member Stefan Ekman, who was a Guest of Honor at Finncon, were present, as was Short Form nominee, Karin Tidbeck. Other countries represented at Finncon this year include Latvia, Estonia, Russia, China, France, Canada, the UK, and the USA.

The winning works will be announced in August. Each winning author and translator will receive a cash prize of US$350.

ARESFFT President Professor Gary K. Wolfe said: “The number of fine works that our jury has to consider is increasing each year. We are delighted to be able to bring such fine fiction from a wide range of different cultures to the attention of the English-speaking world.”

First an apology: this spring turned out rather more hectic than expected, so I have let the blog slip somewhat. For that, I’m sorry! I’ll try to make amends.

Now the main topic of this blog. For the past few days, I have been the guest scholar of Finfar and Finncon in Helsinki. It has been a fabulous experience!

For two days, I attended the Finfar seminar, where young scholars discussed their submitted work with each other and with senior researchers in the field. The texts spanned the entire width and length of fantastic scholarship, ranging from studies of Donald Duck to William Gibson, of fantasy names to fanfic, of Tolkienian evil to vampire boyfriends and much more. And I can safely say that Finnish research into the fantastic is in very good shape indeed, leagues ahead of Sweden.

The con itself was also superb. All program items that I attended, in the audience or as participant, were well organized. I could invariably leave them feeling enlightened, entertained, or both. (Entertainment was also provided by all the wonderful people in wonderful costumes that floated around in the halls. Although the dwarf party that won the masquerade were great, my personal favourite is still the dinosaur that made an appearance during yesterday morning.)

The most moment for me was when I found myself filked at by the Filk Freaks from Tampere, however. Drawing on some ideas about urban fantasy that I had presented in the program booklet, they had written lyrics to go with an ABBA song. As I think it is brilliant (and as it is the first time someone has turned my fantasy thoughts into song), I reproduce it below, with permission.

Opposing Forces

(Lyrics by Marianna Leikomaa. Music: Mamma Mia!)

I’ve read fantasy books since I don’t know when
Getting into their worlds time and time again
Sometimes it feels they’re not credible
All these ordeals, but the world itself makes no sense
It is all just a big pretense.
Give me realistic worlds with two sides
Not just good or bad but let me decide, w-o-o-o-oh

Opposing forces, urban fantasies
My my, how can I resist you?
Opposing forces, in best fantasies
My my, just how much I miss you!
Yes, I’ve read crappy fiction
Where there is no conviction
Why, why are there no more things unseen?
Opposing forces, in best fantasies,
Oh oh, help me shape realities.